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That its plot is not sensible just isn’t actually the issue with “Tommy.” When it first appeared as an idea album, in 1969, it was, in any case, billed as a rock opera. And let’s face it, when you’ve ever paid consideration to its story unstoned, you’re going to have some questions, simply as you would possibly with “The Magic Flute.”
Nor are you able to complain concerning the rock a part of the billing; there’s some fairly magic guitaring occurring, and a few righteously harmonized vocals.
Translations to movie and the stage have provided further pleasures. The 1975 film gave us Tina Turner in prime kind — sufficient mentioned. The unique 1993 Broadway musical, with its flying Tommy and galloping pinball machine, was a visible groundbreaker, warmed by glorious performances. Even the colder, coarser revival that opened Thursday on the Nederlander Theater, lengthy since rebranded as “The Who’s Tommy,” gives the joy of huge, poppy belting.
Who’s Tommy certainly! And whose? Despite all its incarnations, the expertise that makes probably the most highly effective use of Pete Townshend’s infernally catchy songs stays the one which takes place within the ear’s creativeness. Largely free of the burdens of literalness, the album didn’t have to make sense to make historical past.
Today, although, until you’re a die-hard fan who thrills robotically to each lick and lyric, it’s your decision one thing that calls itself musical theater to supply greater than a full-tilt assault on the senses. This manufacturing — directed, like the unique, by Des McAnuff — gained’t present that, being much less enthusiastic about attempting to place throughout the story (by McAnuff and Townshend) than in obscuring it with relentless noise and banal imagery.
To be truthful, the story, set throughout World War II and the 20 years after, most likely advantages from some obscurity. We first meet Tommy Walker as a cheerful 4-year-old (Olive Ross-Kline, alternating with Cecilia Ann Popp). But when his father (Adam Jacobs) returns after a number of years in a prisoner-of-war camp, and kills the lover that his mom (Alison Luff) has acquired within the meantime, the boy is traumatized. Witnessing the taking pictures, he immediately loses his potential to listen to, communicate and see, leaving him a shell of a kid, defenseless in opposition to his dad and mom’ rages and his pedophile uncle (John Ambrosino). It additionally makes him, for a musical, a weird protagonist, spending most of his time staring into a big, symbolic mirror.
To clear up that drawback, and reveal his dissociation, the authors break up Tommy into three coexisting incarnations. The 10-year-old model (Quinten Kusheba, alternating with Reese Levine) is, if attainable, much more unresponsive, baffling many medical doctors who apparently failed their psychiatry programs. Seeking a treatment, his anguished father brings him, as one does, to a prostitute and heroin addict known as the Acid Queen (Christina Sajous). Only after she guarantees “to tear his soul aside” does dad assume higher of it.
But if Tommy stays what the well-known (and now problematic) lyric calls “that deaf, dumb and blind child,” he isn’t with out feeling. In his teenagers, his potential to reply to vibrations turns him right into a “pinball wizard” and one way or the other thus a star. Emerging from the damaged mirror of his childhood, he turns into, in Ali Louis Bourzgui’s cool portrayal, an emblem of the potential for reintegration, restoration and rock stardom: a younger grownup with a cult.
This parade of wierd plot factors and narrational perplexities passes fairly swiftly — maybe, at little greater than two hours, too swiftly, because the story is tough to observe and more durable to swallow.
That’s why I discover it extra worthwhile to consider “Tommy” not as a sequence of occasions however as a dream you’re watching from a perch inside somebody’s amygdala. That particular person would in fact be Townshend, who grew up in London at 22 Whitehall Gardens — not removed from Tommy’s residence at 22 Heathfield Gardens. He not too long ago informed The Times that “Tommy” might be “a memoir during which I work out my childhood stuff.” Though his abuse, he mentioned, was by the hands of his “terrible” grandmother, not his “neglectful and careless” dad and mom, he evidently suffered from sufficient trauma and exploitation to make himself a mannequin for Tommy.
The earworm tunes and peculiar lyrics by which the grownup Townshend processed that trauma make the present shifting when provided on the proper scale. Ambivalence is the keynote. There’s no excusing the injury executed to him by others, and but, as with Tommy, that injury can be what supplied him together with his reward. (“Sickness will certainly take the thoughts/Where minds can’t often go,” the boy sings within the aptly named “Amazing Journey.”) On the opposite hand, Townshend, or a minimum of his avatar right here, finds that “freedom lies in normality.” This is the alternative of rock’s countercultural pose; ultimately, the one to whom Tommy sings the anthem “Listening to You” just isn’t a crowd of admirers however his mom.
McAnuff’s manufacturing doesn’t visitors in such subtleties. The whole heat, emotional finish of the present’s spectrum has been lopped off, leaving solely black, white and garish yellow. Even the string quartet that was a part of the 1993 orchestration has been eradicated. Also lacking from that model: the flying that was so efficient and poetic as a illustration of Tommy’s inside aspirations.
Instead, the highest staging be aware is supplied by Peter Nigrini’s projections, together with stay video, that tumble throughout David Korins’s skeletal, shape-shifting set. (The pinball machine is so spindly it seems as whether it is made from Ok’nex.) The lighting by Amanda Zieve is intentionally chilly and harsh.
Nor is there any try at complexity throughout the manufacturing’s strict parameters. The imagery is a catalog of clichés. Tommy’s safety guards put on SS-style greatcoats by Sarafina Bush. A projection of an enormous field of Lux cleaning soap flakes looms over the in any other case unidentifiable spot the place Mrs. Walker is doing laundry. Racks of clearly faux check tubes are relayed hand-to-hand when Tommy is being examined by medical doctors. I’ll grant that the Acid Queen’s spinning wheel is an surprising gesture, nevertheless it’s bewildering. Is she a Fate?
If so, her message to her fellow characters maybe must be: You will likely be overwhelmed. However loudly and nicely the performers sing, nevertheless frenziedly they dance Lorin Latarro’s dystopian choreography, they hardly ever floor from the manufacturing’s flooding of the senses with any expressiveness intact.
Still, lovers of rock concert events with tons of results might but like “Tommy,” even when it appears self-defeating to parrot arena-show aesthetics in a musical that implicitly criticizes arenas as websites of inconsiderate idolization and fascistic violence. What I missed in the midst of all that overemphasis was some sense of humanity, a few violins balancing the guitars, a contact of actual Townshend. Because when the whole lot’s an impact, irrespective of how sensible, none may be particular.
The Who’s Tommy
At the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan; tommythemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.
